Tales of Science and Adventure

Month: October 2012

Imagine you’re flying through the air, about to collide with the road at approximately 32km/hr. What do you feel in that moment? A flash of terror? Reflex preparedness? Fatalism?

The correct answer: not a whole lot of anything. You don’t have time to think about it.

You won’t remember the impact. Your brain skips straight ahead from that suspended instant in midair, then you’re on the ground and your instincts have kicked in: ignore your injuries, get off the road, drag your bike out of the way of traffic. Blood is running down your left forearm and one of your riding gloves is stained brown from clutching the elbow. It’s funny how no one in Hollywood seems to know just how quickly that sacred life fluid oxidises once outside the body.

You don’t really feel the pain yet; your mind is back in your apartment months ago, reliving a conversation you had with your housemate. You’d sworn you would never become one of those wanky east-siders who cycle around wearing Lycra and gloves. He advised you to at least reconsider the gloves, said you’d be grateful for it when you eventually came off. He was right.

Concentrate, stay in the moment.

The driver has gotten out and is explaining something about blind spots while a fierce old woman berates him. A couple of passers-by have rushed over and are asking if you’re ok; telling you to do things, telling you to get the driver’s details. Later on you will not remember their faces or even how many there were. It’s ok, it’s the shock. You realise you’re limping a bit. You try to inspect your elbow but it’s hard to judge with all the blood and the funny angle. It looks deep. The front bonnet of the car has popped off from the force of the crash, and you’re surprised to find you feel slightly proud.

The most realistic stories are the true ones.

It was about six months ago that I had my accident. Melbourne’s not the easiest city in which to be a cyclist. Numbers of riders have increased hugely over the past decade, but I still consider us pioneers of sorts, forging a path forward in a hostile environment for the good of future generations. This idea isn’t mere fancy- there’s a well-documented relationship between the number of cyclists in a city and the safety of cycling.

The theory is that as motorists become more accustomed to sharing the road with cyclists, they get better at looking for them. This is something I can definitely believe. Some of my best-practised manoeuvres include swerving to avoid clueless pedestrians and slamming on the brakes when a driver suddenly turns left. I’m constantly awaiting the unexpectedly opened car door that will be the last thing I ever see. Amusing door-related epitaphs welcome.

It’s early 2009 and I’m in Kanchanaburi, Thailand. Right now my home state is being torn apart by the worst bushfires in recently history, in which 173 people will ultimately die. But right now I know nothing of this; my mind is in the past, occupied with another tragedy of human life: Kanchanaburi is home to the infamous Death Railway, where over 100,000 prisoners of war died during the Second World War. Having visited the poignant bridge and war museum, I’ve hired a push-bike for the day in order to see the town and visit a memorial several kilometres away. I’m weaving happily amongst motorists and motorcyclists down the main road. Bikes are common enough here that people look for you, and consequently I feel safer than ever I did in Melbourne. If I were to come off, I’ve heard stories that maybe the locals would rush over and pour Coca-Cola on the wound since it’s the only sterile substance they have easy access to.

Back in Melbourne: twenty minutes after the crash everyone has left and I’m dazed in the city clutching my elbow, wondering helplessly where the nearest hospital is. I call my best friend, who was actually waiting to meet me, and tell them I won’t be able to make it. As I explain what’s happened, my voice breaks.

There’s a special type of distress that comes from having your body damaged. It’s separate from the physical pain, born instead from the terrible possibilities of the future. Will you ever recover from the wound? What will life be like if you can’t?

I can fully feel the pain in my elbow now, and sickening thoughts are swimming through my mind of punctured bursas and severed ligaments. Talking to my friend, these thoughts momentarily overcame me. Stop being a pansy I reprimand myself. This is nothing, you’re just in shock.

On the tram to Melbourne Hospital – the only place I can think to go – the other passengers stare uncomfortably at my bloodied arm. I feel somehow indecent. Someone lamely asks if I’m ok.

Endone is an amazing drug. It’s a semi-synthetic opioid related in structure to morphine and heroin, and like its cousins, it can cause addiction. I have a nurse acquaintance who was shocked to hear that the doctor had prescribed it to me for such relatively minor injuries.

I relive its sensations: the warm tingling all over my skin, the sleepy happiness, the slight spinning of the world. It was like burying the pain in my elbow and hip under a pile of fluffy blankets. One side effect however is that it inhibits memory formation.

I lost most of the week after the crash in a forgotten drugged haze, punctuated only by random scenes like mirages in a desert. At some point I was wandering through JB Hi-Fi, awed by the lights and sounds; I was swaying through the office and my supervisor was there telling me to go home and rest; one time I was rolling around on my bed, ecstatic from the feel of the sheets on my face, only dimly aware of people watching me from the doorway.

Oh thin green nurturing strip. Somewhere to call home. A conduit for our kind, a facade of safety. Oh how I’ve followed you and yearned for you.

It’s five hours before a surgeon finally sees me. I will never be able to repay the incredible friend who stayed with me that whole night and probably suffered worse than I did, having to helplessly watch me flinch with every pass of the needle through my skin. Weeks later my sister cut the crusty stitches out using a scalpel blade.

I’m also not sure if I can describe the boredom that builds over five hours with nothing to distract you, boredom that grows into frustration and boils over to rage. Rage toward the understaffed public health system, toward the pointless waste of life, and especially toward the unapologetic scumbag who hit me. Oh yes, of course you wanted to just call it even and go our separate ways.

In the days that followed I fantasised about my assailant, about vandalising his car, suing him. Anything. I didn’t want money, I wanted justice. Why was I in bed, useless, dull pain looming just below the surface, while he was still driving around, probably carefree, probably still a threat to my other friends on two wheels? I regularly obsessed over whether the accident might’ve been my fault, but the outraged old woman kept returning to my mind to reassure me that she’d seen it all and I was in the right. I tried calling the police, the TAC. Medical expenses and bike damage weren’t great enough to claim anything, and the policeman told me there is no penalty for negligently hitting a cyclist. I stewed.

In 2003, Pucher and Dijkstra found that American cyclists are 12 times more likely to have a lethal accident per kilometre travelled than car occupants. de Hartog et al (2010) compared several costs and benefits of cycling, including physical exercise, air pollution exposure and the risk of accidents. They concluded that the benefits were the greater by an order of magnitude. This was further reinforced by Karl Ulrich, who calculated that each year of sustained cycling adds about 10.6 days to a person’s life due to the fitness benefits- even accounting for the extra risk of accident. If you do the sums assuming 1 hour of cycling per day, 5 days a week, then your time spent peddling roughly equals your longevity gain. That is, if you spend about 10.6 days riding in a year, you live on average about 10.6 days longer. So really, while you’re cycling you do not age.

To be a cyclist is to follow water. In most cities, lakes, rivers and coastlines are the only spaces that get set aside for our species to roll along in peace. Everywhere else is the noise and agitation of motor vehicles. So we learn to love water, to see parallels in the way we both smoothly flow along, and to finally get where Sebastian’s coming from in “Under the Sea”. It’s not pleasant to leave these havens and battle with uncaring traffic in order to infiltrate the city, but I shall continue to do so. The average life expectancy of a male in Australia is 79 years. I figure that if I ride steadily for the next 35 years of my life, that’s 35 x 10.6 = 371 extra days that I’ll get. So when I hit 80 (as I statistically expect to do!), I’m going to lean back in my rocking chair with my false teeth and my Alzheimer’s disease, foggily remember that bastard who drove into me, and have a chuckle about who’s still stan… rocking.